About the Author

Walter Palmer, CFI, CPP, CFE

Walter E. Palmer, CFI, CPP, CFE, is CEO/president of PCG solutions, a loss prevention consulting, training, and education firm. He has thirty years' experience in retail loss prevention and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and as a guest lecturer for Eastern Kentucky University’s executive lecture series. He is active in professional development and training as member of the American Society for Training and Development, the International Society for Performance Improvement, and the American Management Association. He can be reached at 859-271-3140 or at wpalmer (at) PCGsolutions (dot) com.

Articles by Walter Palmer, CFI, CPP, CFE

Read any retail trade publication or mainstream news-media article about our industry, and chances are that you will walk away feeling bearish on the future of this business. Go to a retail trade show, and you are likely to hear speaker after speaker emphasizing change, business disruption, moving to e-commerce,

“What is the single most important measure of the success or failure of your company’s loss prevention efforts?”

If you were to ask senior retail executives this question, the answer you would likely hear is, “Our shrinkage results.” This would not be surprising, as shrinkage affects profitability, shareholder return, resource allocation

Most, if not all, of us have experienced this maxim time and time again in our business careers. We have a brilliant plan that will significantly reduce shortage, improve efficiencies, and increase safety of our employees and customers. There is just one problem: we

Over the past 25 years, return on investment, profit center, cost center, and value-added have become significant buzzwords in the loss prevention industry. While not unique to our industry–these concepts are also important in other staff functions, such as information technology and finance–I can’t imagine ROI has gotten any more attention than

Over the past few years, the mantra of “doing more with less” has become so ingrained in corporate and business jargon that it goes unchallenged, unquestioned, and accepted as a legitimate business strategy. It is almost impossible to pick up a business publication, a newspaper, or read an industry blog

RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification and, this may surprise you, RFID is not new. In fact, it has been around since World War II and has been used in a wide variety of settings and applications. However, only recent developments have made RFID a practical means of changing the

According to industry surveys as well as industry buzz, it’s one of the hottest technologies in the retail loss prevention industry, with users swearing by it and companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement it. What is all the excitement about? Online POS exception reporting systems.

For market, district, and regional-based loss prevention personnel, store visits are a key component of their responsibilities. Of course, there are many reasons for store visits, ranging from an investigation to a special event to a physical inventory. But none is more common, more routine, and more important for many

While electronic article surveillance (EAS) has become pervasive in the US retail market, there are still a large number of retailers that have yet to adopt source tagging within their approach. With evolving technology and the approach of RFID, many loss prevention executives continue to evaluate the best approach for

In the September/October issue of LossPrevention, we focused on mapping out the process by which we sell a proposal to senior executives and identifying the premise on which that proposal might be justified. In Part 2, as we continue to explore the framework of gaining approval

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From a new crowdsourcing, crime-solving tool to a thoughtful conversation with Kevin Valentine of Signet Jewelers, from the latest data and results from the NRF's 2017 ORC survey to research and insights on food waste reduction, the January–February 2018 issue of LP Magazine delivers great ideas to make you a smarter LP professional.